audience is of course aware all along) and her husbandâs acquiescence in the prospect of becoming the putative father of Hercules as his reward for having unwittingly conceded the
jus primae noctis
to Jupiter; but Kleist also emphasizes Alcmeneâs confusion and anguish and subtly exploits the themeâs serious potential. His procedure in
The Marquise of O
â is essentially similar. What has happened? During the storming by Russian forces of a citadel commanded by the heroineâs father, she has fallen into the hands of some ruffianly enemy troops who attempt to rape her; she is rescued from them by the young Russian officer Count Fâ, but he himself, in the heat of battle, yields to the sudden temptation offered by her fainting-fit. Kleist at first withholds this last fact from the reader by teasingly inserting a dash into the middle of a sentence, but we are almost at once supplied with two clues to it: the Countâs unexplained embarrassment when asked to identify the would-be perpetrators of the outrage, and secondly his cry, as he falls apparently mortally wounded in another battle, of âGiulietta, this bullet avenges youâ â using what we are told is the Marquiseâs first name. The narrative presently refers to her unaccountable symptoms of early pregnancy, and then immediately to Fââs extraordinary first visit to her familyâs house, when with inexplicable insistence he urged her to marry him at once: inexplicable, that is, to the Marquise and her relatives, but the reader by now at the latest sharesthe Countâs and the narratorâs knowledge of the true facts. If the slowness of everyone else to grasp them, and the extraordinary consternation and fuss that follow their eventual disclosure, seem excessive to the present-day reader, he must bear in mind the standards and prejudices of North German aristocratic families such as Kleistâs own â the code by which what this gentleman has done to this lady is not only unspeakable but literally unthinkable. What is not wholly clear is whether, and if so to what extent, Kleist consciously intended to put the melodramatic behaviour of Giulietta and her family in an ironic, parodistic light. If he did not, then the story does not really come off as a work of art; if he did, then it has a subtlety comparable with that of
Amphitryon
. In either case, however, it is a text of considerable psychological interest. One curious feature is Kleistâs depiction of the extreme rage of the father at his daughterâs supposed fall from virtue, and the more or less explicitly incestuous element in the scene of their reconciliation. The motif of a fatherâs jealous and protective love for his daughter and her passionate devotion to him, brought into currency by Rousseauâs
La Nouvelle Héloïse
, was in Kleistâs time a literary topos in German drama (cf. Lessingâs
Emilia Galotti
, Lenzâs
The Soldiers
, H. L. Wagnerâs
The Infanticide
, Schillerâs
Luise Miller
; post-Kleistian parallels are Hebbelâs
Maria Magdalena
and Hauptmannâs
Rosa Berndt
). In
The Marquise of O
â Kleist accentuates this commonplace theme, parodistically perhaps, to a point verging on the grotesque. Then there is Giuliettaâs dramatic polarization of her lover or assailant into âangelâ and âdevilâ; this too might be dismissed as a literary cliché, but it seems to be something more. Giuliettaâs whole relationship to the Count is an enigma to her, which she can only gradually resolve. The Count himself is enigmatic, with a dark and irrational streak in his nature. He rescues Giulietta from his troops, only to use her himself a moment later as a prize of war â we are reminded of the paradoxical association oflove and violence in
Penthesilea
. Above all, Count Fâ carries with him, as we learn in what is certainly the oddest passage in the story (p. 82 ), a